Specifically for Departmental Computer Workstation Evaluators, learn the basics of how to evaluate and modify computer workstations according to campus ergonomic guidelines in this practical, hands-on workshop. Enroll online through the UC Learning Center

Most vascular flowering plants are able to form symbiotic associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. These associations, named arbuscular mycorrhizas, develop in the roots, where the fungus colonizes the cortex to access carbon supplied by the plant. The fungal contribution to the symbiosis includes the transfer of mineral nutrients, particularly phosphorus, from the soil to the... More >

The ability of epithelial cells to move through complex tissue barriers fundamentally regulates important physiological and pathological phenomena, such as embryogenesis, organ development, wound repair, and tumor metastasis. In pathogenesis, including fibrosis and cancer, matrix stiffening is known to induce epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and enhance cell migration in clustered... More >

MVZ Lunch is a graduate level seminar series (IB264) based on current and recent vertebrate research. Professors, graduate students, staff, and visiting researchers present on current and past research projects. The seminar meets every Wednesday from 12- 1pm in the Grinnell-Miller Library. Enter through the MVZ's Main Office, 3101 Valley Life Sciences Building, and please let the receptionist... More >

Steve Cousins is CEO of Savioke. He is passionate about building and deploying robotic technology to help people. Before founding Savioke, he was the President and CEO of Willow Garage, where he oversaw the creation of the robot operating system (ROS), the PR2 robot, and the open source TurtleBot.

Debates about climate change often involve ad hominem attacks. Each side is accused of insincerity, of merely serving special interests. In particular, those who advocate policies to promote energy conservation or otherwise reduce CO2 emissions can be challenged if their personal energy use appears to be high. Our studies indicate that an attack based on high personal carbon footprint can be... More >

This workshop will introduce tools (notably dplyr and tidyr) that makes data wrangling and manipulation much easier. Participants will learn how to use these packages to subset and reshape data sets, do calculations across groups of data, clean data, and other useful stuff.

The motivating question for this talk is: What does a sparse Erd\"os-R\'enyi random graph, conditioned to have twice the number of triangles than the expected number, typically look like? Motivated by this question, In 2014, Chatterjee and Dembo introduced a framework for obtaining Large Deviation Principles (LDP) for nonlinear functions of Bernoulli random variables (this followed an earlier... More >

Manifold-valued data and manifold-valued functions play an important role in a wide variety of applications, including mechanics, computer vision and graphics, medical imaging, and numerical relativity. This talk will describe a family of interpolation operators for manifold-valued functions, with an emphasis on functions taking values in symmetric spaces and Lie groups. A key role in our... More >

We propose a general framework for unbiased estimation of quadratic forms of regression coefficients in linear models with unrestricted heteroscedasticity. Economic applications include variance component estimation in multi-way fixed effects and random coefficient models. The large sample distribution of our estimator is studied in an asymptotic framework where the number of regressors grows in... More >

I will discuss boundary amenability and how to prove it for basic groups for most of the hour. The main interest in boundary amenability is that it implies the Novikov conjecture in manifold theory. I will then outline the main ideas in the proof of boundary amenability of Out\((F_n)\). This is joint work with Vincent Guirardel and Camille Horbez.

This talk is the summary of new geometric approch to the quantum integrable spin chains. As a warm up, I will illustrate these ideas on the example of $sl(2)$ XXZ spin chain: we will obtain conventianal $sl(2)$ Bethe ansatz for this model from geometry of cotangent bundles over grassmannians. In the second part we use same ideas to derive Bethe ansatz for moduli spaces of instantons. As a... More >

This talk will present and critique a new body of evolving collaborative work at the intersection of art, computer science, and design research. It will present an argument for hybrid materials, methods, and artifacts as strategic tools for insight and innovation within computing culture. The narrative will explore work across three primary themes  New Making Renaissance, Design Research, and... More >

Between the 1890s and the Vietnam era, many thousands of American Protestant missionaries were sent to live throughout the non-European world. They expected to change the people they encountered, but those foreign people ended up transforming the missionaries. Their experience abroad made many of these missionaries and their children critical of racism, imperialism, and religious orthodoxy.

We celebrate the publication of Jed Perls major biography of Alexander Calder with this reading and conversation featuring the author and the president of the Calder Foundation.
INCLUDED WITH ADMISSION

Today, artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere  in our phones, vacuums, hospitals, and inboxes  but it can be hard to separate science fiction from science fact. Many discussions about AI imagine a fully autonomous superintelligence that designs itself with little to no human intervention, making decisions in ways that humans cannot possibly understand. Yet the work of designing,... More >

the Humanity of Artificial Intelligence

Join children's book author Laura Atkins, co-author of Fred Korematsu Speaks Up, to learn more about the children's book industry and how to access diverse, justice-oriented texts for your classrooms. UCBHSSP teacher leader Jennifer Brouhard will share lessons she developed to support use of Fred Korematsu Speaks Up.

OPR has selected vehicle-miles-of-travel (VMT) as the preferred metric to comply with Senate Bill 743 (SB 743). The recommended changes to the CEQA Guidelines include a Technical Advisory that provides recommendations about VMT screening, methodology, and thresholds. These recommendations require fundamental changes in current transportation impact analysis practices and have implications for... More >

This series challenges the notion that science and politics should not mix. Building on the March for Science and the People's Climate March, we'll discuss how research in the public interest can make an impact in a political environment dominated by corporate interests, from the major parties to the media.

Weekly discussions will focus on case studies of activist scientists, political... More >

The Oliver E. Williamson Seminar on Institutional Analysis, named after our esteemed colleague who founded the seminar, features current research by faculty, from UCB and elsewhere, and by advanced doctoral students. The research investigates governance, and its links with economic and political forces. Markets, hierarchies, hybrids, and the supporting institutions of law and politics all come... More >

This talk presents highly scalable parallel algorithms for problems with sparse all-to-all interactions such as many-body and matrix computations. These kernels are used in many applications ranging from scientific simulations to machine learning. We discuss a case study of our communication-avoiding kernels as used in graphical model structure learning.

Drop by the art study centers on Free First Thursday for an up-close look at treasures from the BAMPFA collections, laid out on the five tables in the seminar area. In conjunction with this years Bay Area Science Festival (October 26 through November 11), UC Berkeley scientists give us their take on a nonrandom selection of art from our collections. Works on view might include: Harold Edgertons... More >

This full-day conference will bring together a diverse set of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to explore what federalism means now. In this era of shifting state and federal policy positions, what constraints and opportunities does federalism present? Can people of different views agree on rules and principles to guide us going forward?

Criminal justice reform, in its many manifestations, is a difficult and controversial issue. Some believe that our current sentencing regime is unfair, that too much discretion has been removed from judges, that the pendulum has swung too far in terms of imposing harsh sentences, and that increased incarceration has led to other inequities in our society. Others believe that increased... More >

Angie Wilson mines seismic cultural shifts and the subtleties of consciousness in her textile-based sculpture and installations. She will be discussing current and recent projects including Protest Curtains, collaborative projects resisting racism, xenophobia and inequality, as well as her woven meditations on space and time.

The 2017 Human Rights Center Fellowship Conference at UC Berkeley School of Law features 14 extraordinary students from three University of California campuses whose work spanned Peru, Brazil, Mexico, India, Mongolia, Syria, Turkey, and the United States. The Fellows addressed the rights of children, immigrants, climate refugees, women, indigenous people, and the dying. They worked with activists... More >

The 2017 Human Rights Center Fellowship Conference at UC Berkeley School of Law features 14 extraordinary students from three University of California campuses whose work spanned Peru, Brazil, Mexico, India, Mongolia, Syria, Turkey, and the United States. The Fellows addressed the rights of children, immigrants, climate refugees, women, indigenous people, and the dying. They worked with activists... More >

Fit some fun and fitness into your day with these free, beginner dance classes. Zumba will be on 9/8 and 12/1, Samba will be on 10/6 and Polynesian/Hula will be on 11/3. No partner required. Comfortable clothing and athletic shoes recommended.

We review the basics of linear programming and describe a generalization to oriented matroids. We then discuss analogues of linear programming duality and the simplex algorithm in the matroidal setting.

In this talk we'll present the latest results on the integration of silicon-photonic interconnects into a monolithic platform (45nm SOI logic process and bulk CMOS memory periphery process). These include world's first microprocessor communicating to the outside world with monolithically integrated Si-Photonic devices, as well as first demonstrations of photonics in bulk CMOS processes. Well... More >

Hydrogels prepared from self-assembling peptides are promising materials for medical applications, and using both L- and D-peptide isomers in a gels formulation provides an intuitive way to control the proteolytic degradation of an implanted material. In the course of developing gels for delivery applications, we discovered that a racemic mixture of the mirror-image β-hairpin peptides,... More >

Every Friday in the semester, the CMES hosts an informal weekly coffee hour and guided discussion of current events in the Middle East and North Africa, open to all and free of charge. Check the calendar the Monday before the Salon for the current week's topic.

Anthony Cheung (b. 1982, San Francisco) is a composer and pianist. His output ranges from solo to orchestral works, occasionally with electronics. His music has been commissioned by leading groups such as the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio... More >

In this seminar session, I will discuss some emerging and troublesome developments that are becoming clear as the marketplace for cultural materials becomes not only increasingly digital, but also fragments into huge numbers of separate distribution channels, and shifts from the (sort of permanent) licensing of digital objects to their performance through streaming. In addition, I'll summarize... More >

What is the relationship between the air we breathe (in Chinese, kongqi) and the qi of Chinese medicine? This talk explores the history of this intersection in order to better understand the cultural underpinnings of the connection between health and environment in China today. Typically translated into English as vital energy, qi has long been at the core of traditional Chinese conceptions of... More >

With the aim of integrating artificial metalloenzymes in vivo, the second talk will present our efforts to combine ArMs with natural enzymes to mimic fundamental features of the metabolism including: cascade reactions, up- and cross-regulation. Having identified the critical metabolites leading to ArMs inhibition in cellulo, our efforts towards performing catalysis in the periplasm of E. coli... More >

Most logicians and theoretical computer scientists are familiar with Alan Turing’s 1936 seminal paper setting the stage for the foundational (discrete) theory of computation. Most however remain unaware of Turing’s 1948 seminal paper introducing the notion of condition, setting the stage for a natural theory of complexity for what I call the “other theory of computation” emanating from... More >

The Berkeley Public Library in conjunction with the Bay Area Science Festival and the global celebration of Dark Matter Day presents Dan McKinsey, UC Physicist and the Georgia Lee Distinguished Professor of Physics. Professor McKinsey will present a lively talk with slides on the 'search for the unseen', an amazing experiment taking place miles underground and addressing the elusive phenomenon of... More >

The goal of this workshop is to link local and regional case studies of food, agriculture, and human-environmental interaction with the broader discussion of global environmental issues and long-term sustainability. Special emphasis is on case studies from Japan, East Asia and the North Pacific Rim.

The Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative is pleased to present the 2017 Resources Roundtable:
Feeding The World at 9 Billion: Global Challenges for Food Production in a Compromised Environment
The triple threat of climate change, soil degradation, and water shortage are increasingly pressuring our food systems. Meanwhile, human population continues to grow exponentially in some of the... More >

Seismic isolation has been used effectively over the past three decades to protect contents of structures. This presentation discusses seismic isolation of equipment using a multi-directional spring, which provides much better damping and self-centering capability.

Title: Miniature eye movements are tuned but not optimal for fine discrimination at the fovea

Abstract: Human eyes are never stable, even during attempts of maintaining gaze on a visual target. Considering transient response characteristics of retinal ganglion cells, a certain amount of motion of the eyes is required to efficiently encode information and to prevent neural adaptation. However,... More >

We introduce a new basis for the polynomial ring called the slide polynomials, which contains Gessel's fundamental basis of quasisymmetric polynomials. One aim is to better understand the geometrically-important basis of Schubert polynomials, whose structure constants count intersection points of triples of Schubert subvarieties of the complete flag variety. Schubert polynomials expand positively... More >

In this presentation I discuss structural equation modeling as a framework for examining developmental processes. First, I present some principles of longitudinal research that underlie both study designs and statistical models for longitudinal data. I then describe models that focus on mechanisms of within-person change, and demonstrate their use for examining developmental processes. I... More >

Come join us to hear research going on in PMB from graduate students and post docs. There will be snacks and coffee/tea. Please bring a mug. Hosted by the Plant and Microbial Biology Student Group (PMBG).

I will present a surprising relation between knot invariants and quiver representation theory, motivated by various string theory constructions involving BPS states. Consequences of this relation include the proof of the famous Labastida-Marino-Ooguri-Vafa conjecture (at least for symmetric representations), explicit (and unknown before) formulas for colored HOMFLY polynomials for various knots,... More >

In this talk I will introduce a class of Legendrian wavefronts associated to surface triangulations. First, I will explain the interplay between the Legendrian isotopy type and the combinatorics of the triangulation. In particular, we will be connecting symplectic geometry and graph theory. Then I will discuss the Floer theory of these wavefronts and provide a description of their dg-algebras.... More >

We will present the recent paper of Charlesworth and Shlyakhtenko in which it is shown that if an $n$-tuple of operators has free entropy dimension $n$, then every selfadjoint polynomial in these operators has an atomless spectral measure.

Modern inferential tasksranging from graphical model learning to image registration to inference of gene regulatory networksfrequently involve estimation of information theoretic functionals such as entropy, mutual information, KullbackLeibler divergence, and total variation distance. This talk will focus on recent progress in our understanding of the performance, structure, and deployment of... More >

Given an abelian scheme over a smooth curve over a number field, we can associate two height functions: the fiberwise defined Neron-Tate height and a height function on the base curve. For any irreducible subvariety X of this abelian scheme, we prove that the Neron-Tate height of any point in an explicit Zariski open subset of X can be uniformly bounded from below by the height of its projection... More >

Because of current federal laws on endangered fish species, water exports to California Aqueducts in San Joaquin Valley and Southern California are restricted by a combination of low Delta Smelt counts and densities in the Bay Delta and judgments by experts. This seminar suggests some ways in which Bayes Factors and combinations of forests of Information Odds Scores can help us improve our... More >

This four-part, interactive workshop series is your complete introduction to programming Python for people with little or no previous programming experience. By the end of the series, you will be able to apply your knowledge of basic principles of programming and data manipulation to a real-world social science application.

In science, models often serve as the bridge between empirical and theoretical, what was found and what is thought to be. Mathematical and computational transformations often play a central, but perhaps partially hidden, role in this bridge. These mathematical transformations can be approached in very transactional terms, necessary evils of little theoretical value to conceptual reasoning. Or the... More >

Architect, researcher, and Berkeley faculty member M. Paz Gutierrez will speak as part of Design Field Notes, a pop-up series that brings a design practitioner to a Jacobs Hall teaching studio to share ideas, projects, and practices.

We discuss regularity results for the cylindrical contact homology of 3-dimensional prequantization bundles and explain how they are compatible with Morse-Bott computational methods. We will also explore applications to quantitative questions in dynamics, such as the refined Conley Conjecture, as previously anticipated by Ginzburg-Gürel-Macarini.

Fine arts organizations across multiple genres and styles are experiencing dwindling audience numbers. As it currently stands, many organizations are reliant on older populations as their primary patrons. This event will bring together artists from multiple fields to discuss how they see their fields innovating in this changing world as well as what is necessary to keep the arts alive for future... More >

A plethora of algorithms and theories developed in the field of Machine Learning enable better identification of system dynamics and extensive control of the corresponding systems. However, the vast majority of research focuses on problems dealing with homogenous observation data sets or control environment.

Such a setting is not representative of the actual way data sets are collected and the... More >